Climate Articles

MUST SEE VIDEO: Michael Specter: The danger of science denial
Michael Specter is a staff writer for the New Yorker. His new book, Denialism, asks why we have increasingly begun to fear scientific advances instead of embracing them.
Vaccine-autism claims, "Frankenfood" bans, the herbal cure craze: All point to the public's growing fear (and, often, outright denial) of science and reason, says Michael Specter. He warns the trend spells disaster for human progress.
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EPA may try to use Clean Water Act to regulate carbon dioxide: Carbonic Acid
WASHINGTON - The Environmental Protection Agency is exploring whether to use the Clean Water Act to control greenhouse gas emissions, which are turning the oceans acidic at a rate that's alarmed some scientists.
With climate change legislation stalled in Congress, the Clean Water Act would serve as a second front, as the Obama administration has sought to use the Clean Air Act to rein in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases administratively.
Since the dawn of the industrial age, acid levels in the oceans have increased 30 percent. Currently, the oceans are absorbing 22 million tons of carbon dioxide a day.
Among other things, scientists worry that the increase in acidity could interrupt the delicate marine food chain, which ranges from microscopic plankton to whales.
"There are all sorts of evils associated with this," said Robert Paine, an emeritus professor of biology at the University of Washington.
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Wrestling with the warm mongers
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - Joe Bastardi believes he is the only meteorologist in the land with a varsity wrestling letter, a trophy from his undergraduate years at Penn State.
And now he may be in the wrestling match of his career, taking on a behemoth: the scientific consensus that the Earth is warming, perhaps catastrophically, and that human-produced carbon dioxide is to blame. Bastardi is one of the most visible forecasters at one of the nation's most visible forecasting companies, AccuWeather Inc., which is almost a Penn State annex. He has long voiced reservations about global warming.
Lately, however, he has become a go-to meteorologist for media seeking a second opinion. He has appeared on The O'Reilly Factor and on the front page of the New York Times. On Tuesday, he's due to tape a segment for The Colbert Report.
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Rename The Scandal Formerly Known As Climategate
So, no conspiracy, no collusion, no manipulation of data, no corruption of the peer-review process, no scandal; just an understandable reluctance to hand over data to dishonest people with a history of misrepresenting it.
Squibs don't get much damper than "Climategate". The most worrying aspect of the drama was the way in which most of the media ditched any attempt at assessing the claims and became caught up in the frenzy, when a couple of hours spent reading the emails and talking to one of two of those involved would have made the conclusions of the House of Commons inquiry entirely predictable.
That's CP's favorite Australian ethicist Clive Hamilton in his ABC column, "Climategate: The lion that squeaked." Note that a "damp squib" is an explosive dud, "a firework that fails to go off, due to wetting," like say, the Segway, questions about Obama's place of birth, or anything Geraldo Rivera reports on.
I don't think "damp squib" will catch on, though, nor did "Swifthack," so offer your own suggestions for renaming the non-gate. Gotta be catchier than TSFKAC to give the status quo media something to write about. They lavished coverage on TSFKAC, but it has mostly been crickets chirping on the exoneration of Phil Jones by the House of Commons. At the very least, CP needs something to call it.
Here's Hamilton's whole piece:
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UN's Ban calls Aral Sea 'shocking disaster'
NUKUS, Uzbekistan – The drying up of the Aral Sea is one of the planet's most shocking environmental disasters, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Sunday as he urged Central Asian leaders to step up efforts to solve the problem.
Once the world's fourth-largest lake, the sea has shrunk by 90 percent since the rivers that feed it were largely diverted in a Soviet project to boost cotton production in the arid region.
The shrunken sea has ruined the once-robust fishing economy and left fishing trawlers stranded in sandy wastelands, leaning over as if they dropped from the air. The sea's evaporation has left layers of highly salted sand, which winds can carry as far away as Scandinavia and Japan, and which plague local people with health troubles.
Ban toured the sea by helicopter as part of a visit to the five countries of former Soviet Central Asia. His trip included a touchdown in Muynak, Uzbekistan, a town once on the shore where a pier stretches eerily over gray desert and camels stand near the hulks of stranded ships.
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Climate change already killing 150,000 a year in low-income economies: WHO
Climate change has begun to affect human health, leading to a rise in cases related to stomach ailments and vector-borne diseases like malaria and dengue. This has been indicated in a report in the recent bulletin of the World Health Organisation (WHO).
The apex global health body reckons that about 150,000 deaths occur annually in low-income countries due to the adverse effects of climate change, chiefly malnutrition due to climate change-driven crop failures, stomach diseases and malaria.
The report says that the rise in atmospheric temperature and sea levels, coupled with extreme weather events, notably higher frequency of floods, cause water logging and water contamination, leading to higher incidence of diarrhoeal ailments. The geographical spread of vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue is also projected to increase.
Besides, the dynamics of communicable diseases may undergo a change, WHO has cautioned. The poorer countries will be affected relatively more because of their deficient health systems and paucity of resources.
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Global health warning
FOR THE first time, scientists have mapped out how climate change is set to affect the health of West Midlanders.
The authors of a pioneering new report say the health impacts of the changing climate are already apparent in the region and warn that "their magnitude will only increase as the century progresses".
Using regional climate predictions for the years 2020, 2050 and 2080, a team of public health scientists has tracked the likely effects on climate-related diseases and deaths, working out how and who will fare best – and worst – from the warming of the West Midlands.
The pattern they developed suggests warmer winters will save lives over the next 70 years.
But at the same time, hotter summers will bring an increase in health problems including food poisoning and skin cancer.
Towards the end of the century the West Midlands can expect to see more than 1,400 extra climate-related deaths each summer – and a similar decrease in winter deaths.
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Arctic thaw frees overlooked greenhouse gas: study
OSLO (Reuters) - Thawing permafrost can release nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, a contributor to climate change that has been largely overlooked in the Arctic, a study showed on Sunday.
The report in the journal Nature Geoscience indicated that emissions of the gas surged under certain conditions from melting permafrost that underlies about 25 percent of land in the Northern Hemisphere.
Emissions of the gas measured from thawing wetlands in Zackenberg in eastern Greenland leapt 20 times to levels found in tropical forests, which are among the main natural sources of the heat-trapping gas.
"Measurements of nitrous oxide production permafrost samples from five additional wetland sites in the high Arctic indicate that the rates of nitrous oxide production observed in the Zackenberg soils may be in the low range," the study said.
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Climate-change skeptics wrong, scientists say in memo to minister
Ottawa urged to follow findings of peer-reviewed research
Canadian scientists from six different federal departments have shot down a recent controversy that raised doubts about whether humans are causing global warming and have urged the government to base its climate-change policies on peer-reviewed research.
In a memorandum, prepared for Environment Minister Jim Prentice prior to his participation at the Copenhagen conference last December, the top-ranking official at Environment Canada said a controversy surrounding stolen emails from a climate-research centre in Britain does not call into question the reliability of the science.
The personal emails exchanged by climate scientists wound up in the hands of special-interest groups and officials including Conservative MPs such as Maxime Bernier and Colin Mayes, who say they are skeptical about peer-reviewed research that concludes humans are causing global warming.
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Mankind leaves mark on the planet with the end of the 12,000-year Holocene age
Biologists have their principles of evolution, physicists have their laws of thermodynamics and chemists have their periodic table. For geologists, perhaps the most hallowed reference source is the Geological Time Scale, a complex timeline depicting the entire history of the Earth as a series of distinct periods, epochs and ages, from the birth of the planet 4.7 billion years ago to the present day.
The Geological Time Scale is quite literally set in stone. As geologists dig down through the different sedimentary layers of rock, they go back in time to periods when prehistoric humans with stone tools hunted mammoths, to an earlier time 100 million years ago when dinosaurs roamed the land, and even to a distant era 3.8 billion years ago when life first arose in the ancient oceans of a more primitive world.
Changes to the Geological Time Scale resulted from natural events, whether it was the mass extinction of life from a giant asteroid impact, or an ice age resulting from changes to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. Now, however, geologists are about to consider whether humans themselves have started to influence the geological history of the world.
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Charities warm to climate
Philanthropic support for climate-change issues tripled in 2008.
Global steps to battle climate change might have faltered, but philanthropic institutions in the United States have swung into action, more than tripling their support for climate-related causes in 2008. Donations jumped from the 2007 total of US$240 million to $897 million in 2008 (see 'Climate concern'), according to a report from the Foundation Center, an organization that supports philanthropies, in New York.
The funding is going to a range of activities, including efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and to prepare cities for warmer temperatures and higher sea levels. Foundation money is also supporting academic researchers studying the effects of climate change and ways to reduce pollution. In 2008, for example, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York gave a grant to Stanford University in California for studies on how agriculture could adapt to a changing climate. The ClimateWorks Foundation in San Francisco, California, is supporting research around the world, including a grant to Wang Lan, a materials scientist at the China Building Materials Academy in Beijing, who is working to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from cement production.
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Study: Global warming could explain why Northeast is seeing more, and fiercer, rainstorms
BOSTON (AP) - The Northeast is seeing more frequent "extreme precipitation events" in line with global warming predictions, a study shows, including storms like the recent fierce rains whose floodwaters swallowed neighborhoods and businesses across New England.
The study does not link last week's devastating floods to its research but examined 60 years' worth of National Weather Service rainfall records in nine Northeastern states and found that storms that produce an inch or more of rain in a day - a threshold the recent storm far surpassed - are coming more frequently.
"It's almost like 1 inch of rainfall has become pretty common these days," said Bill Burtis, spokesman for Clean Air-Cool Planet, a global warming education group that released the study Monday along with the University of New Hampshire's Carbon Solutions New England group.
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Global Aerosols March 2010
March 2010 was a spectacular month for dust storms. For much of the month, dust blew across Africa's Sahara Desert and over the Atlantic Ocean. A monitoring station on the island of Barbados in the Caribbean recorded the highest dust concentrations over the island in the past three years. China also saw massive dust storms that swept over the Pacific from the Gobi Desert in China's interior. The image shows the concentration of particles in the atmosphere (aerosols) during March 2010. A dark brown plume extends west from Africa where thick dust blew over the ocean. Dark brown patches also cover parts of China and Southeast Asia where aerosols clouded the sky. Dust contributed to the aerosols in the north, but smoke is the likely culprit for high aerosols in the south. Fires burned extensively in Southeast Asia through March, veiling the region in a pall of smoke.
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NASA's Grace Sees Rapid Spread in Greenland Ice Loss
A new international study finds that ice losses from Greenland's ice sheet, which have been increasing over the past decade in its southern region, are now spreading rapidly up its northwest coast. The researchers, including Isabella Velicogna, jointly of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and the University of California, Irvine, compared data from the JPL-built and managed Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) mission with continuous GPS measurements made from long-term sites on bedrock on the ice sheet's edges. The Grace and GPS data gave the researchers monthly averages of crustal uplift caused by ice mass loss. They found that the acceleration in ice loss began moving up the northwest coast of Greenland in late 2005. The authors speculate the dramatic ice mass losses on Greenland's northwest coast are caused by some of the big glaciers in the region sliding downhill faster and dumping more ice into the sea.
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Deserts Spreading Like 'Cancer'
Growing deserts in the Middle East and North Africa have already displaced hundreds of thousands from their homes.
The desert is making a comeback in the Middle East, with fertile lands turning into barren wastes that could further destabilize the region, experts said at a water conference on Thursday.
"Desertification spreads like cancer; it can't be noticed immediately," said Wadid Erian, a soil expert with the Arab League, at a conference on Thursday in the Egyptian coastal town of Alexandria.
Its effect can be seen in Syria, where drought has displaced hundreds of thousands of people, ruining farmers and swelling cities, Erian said.
He said Darfur in western Sudan is still reeling from a devastating war exacerbated by a shortage of water and fertile land.
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Climate Change Ups Infectious Disease Risks
Waterborne and insect-transmitted infectious diseases get a big boost from climate change. Steve Mirsky reports
A direct effect on human health related to climate change is the likely increase in infectious diseases transmitted by insects or through contaminated water.
In the March 25th issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, infectious disease researcher Emily Shuman points out that insects are more active at higher temperatures and broaden their range.
Altered weather patterns bring drought to some areas, flooding to others and a higher likelihood of water contamination to both.
The World Health Organization predicts a 3 to 5 percent increase in the population at risk for malaria with a temperature increase of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius. And two degrees is our best-case scenario right now. The WHO also sees 10 percent more diarrheal diseases related to unclean water by 2030 due to climate change.
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Will a Warming Climate Disrupt the Gulf Stream and Other Essential Ocean Currents?
It's true that the melting of the polar ice caps as a result of global warming is sending large amounts of freshwater into the world's oceans. Environmentalists and many climate scientists fear that if the climate heats up fast enough and melts off the remaining polar ice rapidly, the influx of freshwater could disturb ocean currents enough to drastically change the weather on the land as well. The Gulf Stream, a ribbon of ocean water that delivers heat from the tropics up to the North Atlantic, keeps northeastern U.S. and northwestern Europe weather much milder than other areas at the same latitude around the globe. In theory, less salt in the ocean could stall out the Gulf Stream and rob some of the world's greatest civilization centers of their natural heating source, plunging the two continents into a cold snap that could last decades or longer-even as the rest of the globe warms around them.
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Even in the Desert, Plants Feel the Heat of Global Warming
Global warming is a hot topic, and it's causing concern for scientists studying winter annuals in the Sonoran Desert.
While desert winters have become warmer and drier over the years, climate changes have pushed the arrival of winter rains later in the year, forcing winter-annual plants like the curvenut combseed (Pectocarya recurvata) to emerge later when temperatures are colder.
In 1982, Larry Venable, an ecologist at the University of Arizona (UA) in Tucson, began a study at The Desert Laboratory on nearby Tumamoc Hill in order to investigate adaptive "bet-hedging" in plants.
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Even Soil Feels the Heat
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Twenty years of field studies reveal that as the Earth has gotten warmer, plants and microbes in the soil have given off more carbon dioxide. So-called soil respiration has increased about one-tenth of 1 percent per year since 1989, according to an analysis of past studies in today's issue of Nature.
The scientists also calculated the total amount of carbon dioxide flowing from soils, which is about 10-15 percent higher than previous measurements. That number - about 98 petagrams of carbon a year (or 98 billion metric tons) - will help scientists build a better overall model of how carbon in its many forms cycles throughout the Earth. Understanding soil respiration is central to understanding how the global carbon cycle affects climate.
"There's a big pulse of carbon dioxide coming off of the surface of the soil everywhere in the world," said ecologist Ben Bond-Lamberty of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. "We weren't sure if we'd be able to measure it going into this analysis, but we did find a response to temperature."
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Pollution from Asia Circles Globe at Stratospheric Heights
BOULDER -- The economic growth across much of Asia comes with a troubling side effect: pollutants from the region are being wafted up to the stratosphere during monsoon season. The new finding, in a study led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, provides additional evidence of the global nature of air pollution and its effects far above Earth's surface.
Using satellite observations and computer models, the research team determined that vigorous summertime circulation patterns associated with the Asian monsoon rapidly transport air upward from the Earth's surface. Those vertical movements provide a pathway for black carbon, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and other pollutants to ascend into the stratosphere, about 20-25 miles above the Earth's surface.
"The monsoon is one of the most powerful atmospheric circulation systems on the planet, and it happens to form right over a heavily polluted region," says NCAR scientist William Randel, the lead author. "As a result, the monsoon provides a pathway for transporting pollutants up to the stratosphere."
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Geologist Connects Regular Changes of Earth's Orbital Cycle to Changes in Climate
ScienceDaily (Apr. 6, 2010) - In an analysis of the past 1.2 million years, UC Santa Barbara geologist Lorraine Lisiecki discovered a pattern that connects the regular changes of Earth's orbital cycle to changes in Earth's climate.
The finding is reported in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.
Lisiecki performed her analysis of climate by examining ocean sediment cores. These cores come from 57 locations around the world. By analyzing sediments, scientists are able to chart Earth's climate for millions of years in the past. Lisiecki's contribution is the linking of the climate record to the history of Earth's orbit.
It is known that Earth's orbit around the sun changes shape every 100,000 years. The orbit becomes either more round or more elliptical at these intervals. The shape of the orbit is known as its "eccentricity." A related aspect is the 41,000-year cycle in the tilt of Earth's axis.
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Britain blooming earlier thanks to rising temperatures, study says
Nature readings from 1753 until present day – including information from Springwatch viewers – show that change has been greatest in past 25 years
British plants are coming into flower earlier as temperatures rise, according to a study published today which is based on nature records dating back 250 years.
The research, which draws on observations from members of the public, reveals that each 1C rise in temperature has seen blooms appearing five days earlier.
It also shows that despite this year's late signs of spring, caused by a cold winter, long term changes in temperature are taking place.
The change has been greatest in the past 25 years, with flowers coming out between two and 12 days earlier in the past quarter century than in any previous 25-year period.
These latest findings echo a study published in February in the journal Global Change Biology, which showed that animal reproduction had shifted forward by 11 days between 1976 and 2005.
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Swarms of venomous jellyfish move towards British waters
Swarms of highly venomous jellyfish which can devastate fish farms are moving into waters off the British coast, according to experts.
The lethal mauve stingers - Pelagia noctiluca in Latin - are tiny but can cover hundreds of thousands of square miles in one "bloom".
They are normally found in the Mediterranean and Caribbean.
But billions of them are swarming far more frequently into waters in the north east Atlantic as sea temperatures are rising and currents are changing, scientists have discovered.
These venomous creatures can devastate fish farms and in one recent incident 100,000 salmon were killed.
Mauve stingers "bloom" when they move into waters where there is plentiful food, and the north east Atlantic has bountiful supplies of plankton and young fish.
They are also thought to breed more quickly in warmer waters and the seas off the British coast have warmed by up to 1C since 2002.
Experts researching plankton discovered the movement towards British waters, according to a study published in the journal Biology Letters.
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Study Says U.S. Waterways Are Warming
Many streams and rivers in the United States are getting warmer, with the greatest increases in urbanized areas, according to research to be published in an upcoming edition of the journal Frontiers of the Ecology and the Environment.
Twenty major streams and rivers, including the Colorado, Potomac, Delaware and Hudson Rivers, are warming at statistically significant rates, the study found.
Increases in water temperature were often directly correlated to increases in air temperature and high levels of urbanization, said Sujay Kaushal, the paper's lead author and a professor at University of Maryland's Center for Environmental Science.
"We found the most rapid rates of increase in urban areas - this may be related to 'urban heat island effects,' from buildings, parking lots and pavements," he said.
The researchers compiled all the historical data they could find, which in some cases included 50 to 90 years of water measurements. The vast majority of data was from the last 10 years. They found that the annual mean water temperature increase is between 0.02 to 0.14 degrees per year.
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New Earth Epoch Has Begun, Scientists Say
The older you get, the faster the time goes.
Our 4.57-billion-year-old planet may know the feeling. After all, some scientists are suggesting Earth has already entered a new age-several million years earlier than it should have.
Earth's geologic epochs-time periods defined by evidence in rock layers-typically last more than three million years.
We're barely 11,500 years into the current epoch, the Holocene. But a new paper argues that we've already entered a new one-the Anthropocene, or "new man," epoch.
The name isn't brand-new. Nobel Prize-winner Paul Crutzen, a co-author of the paper, coined it in 2002 to reflect the unprecedented changes humans have wrought in the roughly 200 years since the industrial revolution.
The report, however, is part of new push to formalize the Anthropocene epoch.
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2 more glaciers gone from Glacier National Park
BILLINGS, Mont. – Glacier National Park has lost two more of its namesake moving icefields to climate change, which is shrinking the rivers of ice until they grind to a halt, a government researcher said Wednesday.
Warmer temperatures have reduced the number of named glaciers in the northwestern Montana park to 25, said Dan Fagre, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. He warned the rest of the glaciers may be gone by the end of the decade.
"When we're measuring glacier margins, by the time we go home the glacier is already smaller than what we've measured," Fagre said.
From the Himalayas to Alaska, glacier melting has accelerated in recent decades as global temperatures increased. The meltoff shows the climate is changing, but does not show exactly what is causing temperatures to go up, Fagre said.
The park's glaciers have been slowly melting since about 1850, when the centuries-long Little Ice Age ended. They once numbered as many as 150, and 37 of those glaciers eventually were named.
A glacier needs to be 25 acres to qualify for the title.
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Almost all Austrian glaciers shrank in 2009: report
Almost 90 percent of Austrian glaciers shrank in 2009, some by as much as 46 metres (150 feet), the Austrian Alpine Association (OeAV) said Friday.
In a report, the OeAV said 85 out of 96 glaciers had shrunk over the past year.
The biggest changes were seen in the Oetz valley in western Tyrol province, where three glaciers retreated by over 40 metres, and eight by over 20 metres.
"The ice is very thin over large areas, so the glaciers are retreating very quickly," noted Andrea Fischer of the University of Innsbruck, who conducted the measurements for the alpine club.
One glacier bucked the trend and expanded, but only by a few dozen centimetres.
Temperatures were higher than average by about 0.2 degrees Celsius in the winter of 2008-2009 and by 2.1 degrees last summer, the OeAV noted.
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Glacier breaks in Peru, causing tsunami in Andes
LIMA (Reuters) - A huge glacier broke off and plunged into a lake in Peru, causing a 75-foot (23-meter) tsunami wave that swept away at least three people and destroyed a water processing plant serving 60,000 local residents, government officials said on Monday.
The ice block tumbled into a lake in the Andes on Sunday near the town of Carhuaz, some 200 miles north of the capital, Lima. Three people were feared buried in debris.
Investigators said the chunk of ice from the Hualcan glacier measured 1,640 feet by 656 feet.
"This slide into the lake generated a tsunami wave, which breached the lake's levees, which are 23 meters high -- meaning the wave was 23 meters high," said Patricio Vaderrama, an expert on glaciers at Peru's Institute of Mine Engineers.
Authorities evacuated mountain valleys, fearing more breakages.
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Images of Disappearing Glaciers
Melting glaciers have become a well-known symbol of climate change.
Why? "It's one of the simplest indicators of climate change," says Eric Rignot, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a professor at the University of California, Irvine. "Glaciers melt when temperatures are increasing. It's just basic physics."
We also have access to numerous images of disappearing glaciers. Yet sometimes it's hard to know exactly what the pictures are showing.
Below are some of the best photos that glaciologists say illustrate what they are seeing - a worldwide retreat in glaciers due to warming temperatures. The photos represent what is happening both in an individual glacier and in the various regions around the world.
"You don't need to be a scientist to appreciate the magnitude of change of these glaciers," says Rignot. "There shouldn't be any doubt about these images."
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Climate warming leaves 'em cold
Local TV, college meteorologists not not ready to make that prediction.
Harrisburg weatherman Rob Dixon is cool toward dire global warming scenarios.
He simply doesn't believe people have the ability to predict what's going to happen to the climate years in the future.
After all, reasons the ABC-TV 27 veteran, it's hard enough to nail the five-day.
Many of his peers in the area side with him.
They don't deny that the planet is running a fever.
"There's tons of anecdotal evidence," such as retreating glaciers in Montana and dwindling sea ice, Millersville University meteorologist Eric Horst said.
He and other weathermen think humans play at least a minor role.
But as Tom Russell, chief meteorologist for CBS-TV 21 in Harrisburg put it, "Those of us who deal with [weather forecasting] on a day-to-day basis ... tend not to believe" humans are the primary drivers of global warming.
Outspoken AccuWeather Inc. meteorologist Joe Bastardi has gone so far as to say people should study the problem for 20 or 30 more years before deciding whether to take action.
That's folly, shoots back Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C.
Ekwurzel, who has done research in the Arctic, and who debated Bastardi Tuesday on Comedy Central's "Colbert Report," contends that climate trends are more easily discernible than shorter-term weather events.
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'Make or break' year for Edmonton's parched trees
EDMONTON - A decade-long drought has parched trees and fields across northern Alberta and may be radically reshaping Edmonton's ecology, say forest and climate experts.
Environment Canada says each of the past 10 years has been drier than the long-term average in the city. The past two years have been the driest back to back since record-keeping began in the 1880s. Like withdrawals from a chequing account, the city's trees have drained the soil's deep water and depleted their own stores of carbohydrates and nutrients. That leaves them extremely vulnerable.
"This is the year that's going to make or break many trees," said Victor Lieffers, a professor of silviculture and forest ecology at the University of Alberta. "They're just going to drop right out."
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The Natural World Vanishes: How Species Cease To Matter
If you are a resident of the East Coast of the United States or of Western Europe, when did you last attend a shad bake, eat an eel, or watch Atlantic salmon vault a waterfall? Community shad bakes once celebrated the return of American shad to rivers as a marker of spring. Recently though, a dearth of shad led to a "shadless shad bake" on the Hudson - a river that in its glory days supplied more than four million pounds of shad in one season. Eels were widely consumed by Europeans and Americans in the 1800s and were often featured on holiday tables. And salmon once ran inland in countless numbers, providing sport and food; today, only a few hundred wild salmon remain in the eastern U.S., migrating up a handful of rivers in Maine to spawn.
Today, most people in the U.S. and Europe are scarcely aware that eels, wild Atlantic salmon, shad, and alewives - once-vital sources of food and employment - are no longer a part of their ordinary experience. This decline in importance is a manifestation of a loss of standing in society for these fishes, part of a larger phenomenon involving a regrettable interplay between ecology and the social order.
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Carbon Positive: a chance to protect children affected by climate change
The era of all-night illuminations in shop windows and the open-door policy favoured by shops to help entice you in as you walk by, could well be over.
From the beginning of April, 5,000 organisations in both the public and private sector that use a certain level of energy – the equivalent of an annual bill of around £500,000 – will have to comply with the new "Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme", which establishes a carbon trading scheme for large organisations.
Diverse organisations from supermarkets and shopping centres, to universities, hotels and all government departments, will be part of the scheme. Participants will be required to calculate and register theircarbon emissions and from next year, pay for the carbon they emit.
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On Earth Day: Stop Junk Mail And Keep Trees In The Forests
41pounds.org Keeps Trees at Work Protecting a Healthy Climate
FERNDALE, MI, April 12, 2010 --/WORLD-WIRE/-- The danger of dramatic climate change underlines the need for each of us to find sensible ways we can contribute to keeping the planet healthy. One simple step is to say "NO" to unwanted junk mail. The nonprofit 41pounds.org
service stops your paper junk mail – and keeps more trees in the forest providing oxygen for us to breathe and absorbing carbon to cool the planet.
"The celebration of Earth Day takes on greater urgency as we learn more about climate change," says 41pounds.org co-founder Sander DeVries. "Each of us can make changes that improve our daily lives AND improve the planet's health – like stopping the daily deluge of junk mail that ravages the forests and clutters your home."
With 41pounds.org, you can reduce household clutter and protect a healthy climate.
• More than 100 million trees are destroyed each year to create junk mail.
• The world's temperate forests absorb 2 billion tons of carbon annually to help keep the planet cool and healthy.
• Junk mail produces more greenhouse gas emissions than 9 million cars.
• The average adult spends 70 hours a year dealing with junk mail. Named for the amount of junk mail that the average American adult receives every year, 41pounds.org stops household junk mail by contacting dozens of direct mail companies to remove you from their marketing lists.
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Climate Crock takes on Lord Monckton aka TVMOB - Watch the Video
Peter Sinclair, our favorite climate de-crocker, has taken on The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (TVMOB). I'd be interested in CP readers' comments on the video, especially its framing, and will pass those on to Sinclair:
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Hottest March and hottest Jan-Feb-March on record
It was the hottest March in both satellite records (UAH and RSS), and tied for the hottest March on record in the NASA dataset. It was the hottest (or tied for hottest) January through March in all three records.
The record temperatures we're seeing now are especially impressive because we've been in "the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century." It now appears to be over. It's just hard to stop the march of anthropogenic global warming, well, other than by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that is.
NASA's prediction from last month is standing up: "It is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be set in 2010.? Actually, NASA made that prediction back in January 2009: Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance."
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The Economist does not disappoint
The March 20th -26th cover story of The Economist, "Spin, science and climate change," deftly bypasses the politics surrounding 'climategate', to tackle the more important issue: whether any of this has any bearing on climate change science and policy. This is a refreshing bit of journalism that everyone should read.
It is no secret that we have been unimpressed by the quality of reporting of climate science or late. From the insinuation that data were manipulated (for which there remains no evidence, primae facie or otherwise), to the suggestion that "climate skeptics" had somehow been kept from publishing in peer reviewed literature (how, we wonder, does Lindzen keep getting published?), to the blind repetition of false claims of major errors in the IPCC (when only a couple of actual errors – and none of them in the primary (Working Group 1) report – have been found), to the falsehood that climate data have not been readily available (yes, they have), the reporting has been more akin to the populist fearmongering of the McCarthy era than to the celebrated investigative journalism of Watergate.
That's too bad, and not just because sensationalistic journalism may have done lasting damage to some institutions and individual scientists. More importantly, it has done damage to public understanding, quite the opposite of the rightful role of the free press in a democratic society.
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Rivers Heating Up With Warming
Twenty major U.S. streams and rivers have warmed significantly over the last few decades, according to new research.
Along with warmer air and warmer oceans, rivers also seem to be heating up with global warming. Across the United States, a new study found, water temperatures in some rivers have risen by more than 3 degrees Celsius in the last few decades.
Warmer river conditions could threaten both the biodiversity of waterways and the livelihood of people who drink out of them and live near them, especially in cities where heat-island effects accelerate warming.
"Even modest changes in temperature can have big biological effects," said lead author Sujay Kaushal, an ecologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Solomons.
"We're seeing the fastest rates of temperature increase in the most highly urbanized areas," he added. "That leads us to believe it's a one-two punch of global warming and development."
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Arctic thaw frees overlooked greenhouse gas: study
OSLO (Reuters) - Thawing permafrost can release nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, a contributor to climate change that has been largely overlooked in the Arctic, a study showed on Sunday. The report in the journal Nature Geoscience indicated that emissions of the gas surged under certain conditions from melting permafrost that underlies about 25 percent of land in the Northern Hemisphere.
Emissions of the gas measured from thawing wetlands in Zackenberg in eastern Greenland leapt 20 times to levels found in tropical forests, which are among the main natural sources of the heat-trapping gas.
"Measurements of nitrous oxide production permafrost samples from five additional wetland sites in the high Arctic indicate that the rates of nitrous oxide production observed in the Zackenberg soils may be in the low range," the study said.
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The heat goes on: After a blitz by climate change skeptics, hard science vindicates their targets
Of late U.S. public opinion has turned very chilly for the vast majority of the world's climate scientists whose data demonstrates that human-generated emissions are heating the globe with potentially catastrophic results. Thanks to a confluence of events, some significant and others bogus, polls show Americans are increasingly confused about the reality of global warming.
After the election of President Barack Obama, the expectation was that the U.S. government would end the foot dragging of the George W. Bush administration and aggressively move to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. While the Environmental Protection Agency did classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant and the House of Representatives passed an ambitious energy bill with cap-and-trade measures to reduce emissions, the bipartisan version in the Senate sponsored by John Kerry, D-Mass, Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., faces tough sledding. The Copenhagen climate summit that was supposed to design a global climate treaty to succeed Kyoto instead produced little more than platitudes about future action. The worldwide economic recession made the costs of combating global warming less acceptable to both industrialized nations and their developing counterparts.
In the midst of that gloomy outlook came a pair of highly publicized incidents that were used to cast doubt on the validity of climate change theory.
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